Why I Built Halls

I did not set out to build a school.

I was trying to find a way to learn.

I grew up in Chittagong and did not follow the conventional secondary-school route. When I was young, I began writing to universities and colleges with a simple question: if I could do college-level work, why should my age or the absence of a particular secondary credential prevent me from doing it?

Most institutions had reasons why it could not be done. Some were willing in principle but required me to relocate. Others were too expensive. Arizona State University eventually gave me a way forward. I studied liberal arts and sciences there and later completed my high-school equivalency through the coursework I had already undertaken.

That experience changed the way I looked at education.

I learned that an institution can use its rules to decide who belongs, or it can use them to give people a way to demonstrate what they can do. I became interested in the difference between those two approaches.

My education later took me to Oxford, Harvard, Maine, Dalhousie and McGill through arrangements that allowed me to study without abandoning my primary academic affiliation. I paid particular attention to how those institutions were organised.

Oxford interested me because of its colleges. A university could contain smaller communities with their own people, traditions and internal life while still belonging to a larger academic system. McGill gave me another way of thinking about the same problem through the Canadian federal system. Different communities and levels of government could retain meaningful authority while remaining part of one country.

I kept coming back to the same question: how much independence can a smaller community have while still belonging to something larger?

That question eventually became Halls.

Halls is the parent organisation. Halls Academy is its education initiative. A hall is a local community within Halls. Education can operate there, but education is not the only reason for the community to exist. Health care, community support, responsible governance and local development can exist alongside the academy.

The distinction matters to me.

A school serves students. A community contains people.

I want to build institutions at a scale where people can actually know the place they belong to and have some influence over what happens there. At the same time, I do not want every community to have to reinvent everything for itself. There should be common academic standards, shared infrastructure and a wider organisation that can provide support when a local community needs it.

That is why I chose the word “Halls.”

The word has a history. Medieval students at Oxford lived and studied in halls before the collegiate system took its modern form. A hall was small enough to be a community. It was also part of something larger.

I liked that idea.

I also wanted the institution to be independent.

I grew up during a period in Bangladesh when the state exercised considerable control over public life. I watched an education system that, in my view, placed too much emphasis on memorisation and too little on independent thought. I also watched the wider political environment become increasingly hostile to dissent.

Those experiences affected me, but they did not make me hostile to institutions. They made me more interested in what institutions should look like.

I do not believe that independence means refusing every outside standard. It means having enough institutional capacity that someone else cannot simply decide what you are allowed to become.

That principle matters to Halls.

My thinking about liberty also came from somewhere less obvious. I grew up watching American television. Cartoon Network, Disney, HBO, National Geographic and Discovery were part of my childhood. Later I read about American history, the civil-rights movement and people such as Martin Luther King Jr. I was interested in the ideals America claimed for itself, but also in the contradictions between those ideals and the reality experienced by many of the people who lived there.

I took “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” seriously because I wanted to understand what those words would mean outside a declaration.

I still do.

I consider myself a cosmopolitan. I care about people as people before I care about the country printed on their passports. At the same time, I take personal sovereignty seriously. I believe people should have meaningful control over their own lives, and communities should have some ability to shape the conditions in which their members live.

Those ideas belong together for me.

The individual matters. The community matters. The larger society matters. The challenge is building institutions that allow those levels to coexist without one swallowing the others.

That is what I am trying to do with Halls.

It is also why I chose to begin in Sitalpur.

I could have started in central Chittagong. There is more commercial activity there and, on paper, an easier market. But central cities already attract resources. There are schools, hospitals, businesses and other services competing for people and investment.

I wanted to begin somewhere closer to home and see whether an institution could bring more of those opportunities into a community outside the main urban centre.

Laila Ahmed Halls is the first physical expression of that idea.

It is small compared with the institution I hope Halls can eventually become. That is intentional. I want to see the model work in a real community before I pretend that it has been proven at scale.

There will be ordinary problems. Buildings have to be maintained. Teachers have to be paid. Students have different needs. Parents disagree. Staff disagree. Money has to be accounted for. Rules have to be written and sometimes changed.

I do not see those things as separate from the philosophy.

They are where the philosophy is tested.

If we say that people have autonomy, we have to decide how they participate in decisions. If we say that halls have their own character, we have to decide what authority they actually possess. If we say that Halls maintains common standards, we have to decide which standards belong at the centre and which decisions belong locally.

I do not expect to solve those questions once and for all.

Institutions change because people change.

That is also why I do not want Halls to depend entirely on me. I started it. I designed much of its structure. My experiences are part of its history. But an institution that cannot outlive its founder is only an extended personal project.

I want Halls to become useful to people who have never met me.

That is the standard I will ultimately judge it by.

I have spent much of my life moving between systems and asking why they were arranged the way they were. I have studied in places where people accepted a structure simply because it had existed for a long time. I have also seen what happens when institutions become so centralised that the people inside them have little meaningful say.

Halls is my attempt to build something in between those extremes.

I am not trying to create a perfect institution. I do not think such a thing exists.

I am trying to create one that leaves room for people.

That work began in Sitalpur.

For me, that is where Halls stopped being an idea and became a place.